Introduction

Wittgenstein’s remarks on sensations and sensation language have typically been discussed in connection with his critique of the notion of privacy, a critique generally thought to reach its apogee in the so-called private language argument. Those commentators who agree that Wittgenstein’s position does not fall into (anything that could be called) behaviourism will often be found saying something like the following: Wittgenstein does not deny the reality of sensations like pain, a reality that transcends behaviour and behavioural dispositions; he only denies that these psychological states or events are known only to the subject, that one learns a concept like pain by some act of inner ostension, that one can only ‘infer’ that others are in pain, etc. These commentators might well regard the first part of his statement that a sensation ‘is not a something, but not a nothing either’ as meaning that a sensation is not a private something. For of course pain is real enough – it’s something – just not anything ‘private’.

To forestall the charge of tilting at straw men, I will give some examples of this tendency.

Ernst Konrad Specht writes that ‘Wittgenstein is only opposed to an erroneous determination of the naming relation between a sensation word and a sensation, but he does not deny that such a relation exists’. And he goes on: ‘Wittgenstein’s discussion is also hostile to an ontological misinterpretation of sensation; more precisely to an ontology which interprets sensation on the pattern of an object which is supposed to be internal and private, in contrast to objects that are external and public’ (Specht 1969, 94).

Bill Child also speaks of a semantic relation or connection holding between two somethings, the sensation word and the sensation, explaining Wittgenstein’s view by saying that a child ‘learns to apply the word “pain” to herself in circumstances where she feels pain.